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There are still a couple of characters who appeared in this week’s episode of Arrow. In The Dragon, Ricardo Diaz manages to obtain a rough meeting with The Quadrant, the main criminal cartel of the country, and two of its members are names well-known to the readers. One of them is Cyrus Broderick, portrayed by Hamza Fouad. In the episode, he doesn’t do anything but sitting and staring at Diaz, but in the comics, in the Prime Earth continuity, his role is much bigger, and despite not being part of The Quadrant, he’s the director of another, scarier criminal group. Let’s see together.

Cyrus Broderick was, apparently, a respectable businessman from Seattle. He worked as Chief Financial Officer for Queen Industries, and when the new CEO, Oliver Queen, re-emerged after being wrongfully thought dead for years, he became one of his closest allies, helping him in taking the reins of his own company and guiding him through the many traps that financial economy laid ahead. Secretly, he was also a leading member of the Ninth Circle, a secret bank that financed criminal operations and held the accounts of robbers, mercenaries and assassins. On behalf of the Ninth Circle, Broderick also directed the Underground Men, a group of slavers who kidnapped and sold people nobody would have ever looked for as slaves. Many of them were acquired by the Ninth Circle directly, led to “rebirth” by burning their skin with molten lava, had their eyes replaced with the Circle’s coins and brainwashed into mindless servants. The reason Cyrus Broderick acted as Oliver Queen’s best adviser was to maintain his position, from where he could use some of the remarkable resources of the company to finance the Ninth Circle’s activities. Of course, he was also perfectly aware of Oliver Queen’s second “job” as the Green Arrow, and this could prove to be a problem for him and his associates. He manipulated Queen so that his two identities eventually clashed, such as when he dragged him to a meeting with a buyer from Seoul, interested in acquiring Queen’s Carbon Nanotube Battery, perfectly knowing that he was the Korean terrorist Kraken. As Queen recognized him, he left the room in a hurry, only to come back minutes after as the Green Arrow to purchase the criminal. This way, however, Broderick was left, in front of witnesses, in lead of the entire operation, which he could carry on the way he liked.

Things started to fall out of Cyrus Broderick’s control the moment Green Arrow learnt of the existence of the Ninth Circle. During an auction at the Underground Men that he presided with his ritual mask, Broderick was found by Green Arrow and Black Canary, and he was forced to flee as the duo defeated his men and freed the captives. This was bad enough per se, but soon after Oliver Queen confronted his “friend” over Queen Industries resources used for unknown purposes and connected to anonymous accounts. Broderick assured him that nothing shady was behind it, and promised to solve the “technical issue” in the shortest time possible, but he knew that his cover was about to blow, if not blown already. Moving to a more direct approach, he hired the assassin Shado to kill Oliver Queen, and he also had his assistant Wendy killed. He planted false evidence convincing the public opinion, and for a time Oliver himself, that Queen was a dangerous drug-addict, a alcoholic who spent the company’s money with prostitutes and other vices, and who mistreated his subordinates and coworkers. While the public was eating Oliver Queen alive, Broderick successfully stole all his fortune, and when the hero confronted him in Queen Tower it was too late already: the Ninth Circle had successfully taken over Queen Industries. As the Green Arrow was about to capture Broderick, Shado appeared, and as the two archers battled, Cyrus moved to a safer location, where he witnessed the fight and its outcome. He then moved back to the Inferno, the Ninth Circle’s headquarters, to report his leader Dante that Queen had survived, but he had been followed, and Green Arrow and his allies arrived to raze the Inferno to the ground. Broderick escaped, and he moved on to another plan: he had successfully attacked and destroyed Oliver Queen, now it was apparently time he did the same with the Green Arrow, taking away from Queen the one thing he had left…

Cyrus Broderick is a cunning and planning criminal mastermind, a long-term tactician who’s specialized in psychological warfare. As a director of the Ninth Circle, he disposes of an incredible fortune and a small army of subordinates, and he uses the one and the others as pawns on his personal chessboard. Always a step ahead of his enemies, Cyrus Broderick is the most dangerous kind of men, the one who understood that the real power is in moving money rather than in threatening people with a gun… or a bow and arrows.